Chapter 104 - The Mid-Atlantic Intercept
Six hours later, we were at forty-one thousand feet.
The cabin of the Gulfstream G650ER was dead quiet, save for the dull, constant rushing of the twin Rolls-Royce engines pushing us eastward across the North Atlantic at Mach 0.88. Below us, through the oval windows, there was nothing but a vast expanse of ink-black ocean under a moonless sky.
Clara sat across from me in a plush cream-leather swivel chair, a steaming mug of black coffee cradled in both hands. Her jacket was draped over the seat beside her, but the Glock remained in a shoulder holster beneath her arm, fully visible. She didn't trust Brandt, who sat thirty feet away in the forward cabin, working quietly on a secure workstation.
I didn't trust him either. In my world, anyone who offered you a sixty-two-billion-dollar empire was either trying to steal your soul or use you as a human shield.
"Julian," Clara said softly, leaning forward so her voice wouldn't carry. "Look at me."
I pulled my eyes away from the dual monitors I had mounted on the executive table. "I'm here."
"You haven't slept in forty-eight hours," she said, her fingers reaching out to cover mine on the trackpad. "Since the moment you opened that encrypted drive at the kitchen table, you've been running numbers. Look at your hands. You're running on pure adrenaline."
"Arthur Sterling-Holt has eighty-two minutes left before his terminal hemodialysis cycle completes in Geneva," I said, pointing to the countdown clock ticking in crimson digits at the corner of my primary screen. "If his private physicians don't get the authorization code from the master escrow account, they will put him into an induced coma. And if he goes into that coma, his executive power of attorney transfers automatically to a Swiss custodial bank controlled by Eleanor’s overseas attorneys."
Clara’s brow furrowed. "Eleanor? How does your mother still have reach over this? We stripped her of every account in Chicago. We left her with nothing but that mortgaged townhome in Naperville."
"That’s what we thought," I said, clicking through a labyrinth of Cayman and Liechtenstein shell entities. "Eleanor wasn't just a surrogate, Clara. She was a blackmailer. When Thomas began skimming from the Vance trust, Eleanor kept a private shadow ledger. She knew Arthur was dying. She knew that if Thomas failed to deliver me to Zurich on my twenty-eighth birthday, the entire Vance trust would face a liquidation penalty. She didn't want the seventy-two thousand dollars for Beatrice’s condo. That was Beatrice being an idiot child."
I pulled up a scanned document dated five days before our wedding.
"Eleanor was trying to force me to co-sign on a mezzanine debt facility using the condo as collateral. If I had signed that loan document, my legal signature would have been tied to the primary Sterling escrow account in Zurich. She wasn't trying to buy Beatrice a home; she was trying to hijack my identity before Arthur could summon me."
Clara stared at the screen, her lips parting in disgust. "She would have sold you to a biomedical consortium for a ten percent brokerage fee."
"She already did," I said bitterly. "Twenty-eight years ago."
Suddenly, the cabin's satellite comms chime rang through the overhead speakers. A red light flashed on the central console between our seats.
Brandt immediately stood up from the forward cabin and walked toward us, his expression grave.
"Julian. We have an intercept."
"Who?"
"Not military," Brandt said, tapping the communications receiver. "A private corporate downlink originating from O'Hare International. It’s routing through an encrypted legal server on LaSalle Street."
I patched the call through to my ThinkPad, routing the audio through my noise-canceling headset. I pressed connect.
"Julian?"
The voice on the other end was trembling, ragged, and breathless. It wasn't Eleanor. It wasn't Thomas.
It was Beatrice.
"Julian, please... oh God, Julian, are you there?" she sobbed, the sound distorted by cellular static. "They're at the apartment. Men in gray suits... they kicked down the door. They took Mom. They said Thomas didn't pay the settlement balance, and they said if I didn't give them the key to the Naperville storage unit, they were going to—"
"Beatrice," I interrupted, my voice flat, mercilessly cold. "Shut up."
The line went dead silent, save for her sharp, hitched intake of air.
"Listen to me very carefully," I said, each word deliberate. "You destroyed Clara's wedding cake. You called my wife a gold-digging whore in front of two hundred guests. You stood in the driveway while Mom called me an unnatural monster. You wanted seventy-two thousand dollars of blood money that didn't belong to you."
"Julian, please! I didn't know!" she screamed. "Mom told me you were hoarding Thomas’s money! She told me you were trying to starve us out!"
"What is the key to the Naperville storage unit, Beatrice?" I asked, watching the telemetry monitor show our aircraft crossing the Irish coast.
"It’s... it’s not furniture," she wept. "It’s a refrigeration container. Thomas put three silver server racks in there last November. He told Mom it was our retirement insurance."
I glanced at Brandt. His eyes widened slightly behind his titanium frames.
"The backup ledger," Brandt whispered to me. "Thomas didn't upload everything to the LaSalle server. He kept the unredacted patient logs in physical storage."
"Beatrice," I said into the microphone. "Get in your car. Drive directly to the 1st District police station on 18th Street in Chicago. Do not go to Mom’s house. Do not call your friends. Walk into the lobby, ask for Detective Miller, and tell him you are surrendering evidence in the Thomas Vance wire fraud investigation. If you do that, you live. If you don't... you're on your own."
"Julian! Wait! Don't hang up—"
I severed the connection.
May you like
I looked at Clara, then up at Brandt. "Arthur isn't waiting for me in Geneva to talk about family legacy. He has Eleanor. And he’s using her to find whatever Thomas hid in that storage locker."
***
